New Quaker Notebook

To err on the side of a partridge egg. I used to think that I had my living will all figured out. I thought, too, that Michael Shiavo's testimony about his wife's wishes was really sufficient to rest the issue of her feeding tube's removal, but Dr. William P. Cheshire Jr.'s March 24th formal affidavit[.pdf] written in support of Terri Schiavo's continued feeding and care has me rethinking the issue, despite some cantankerous attacks on Dr. Cheshire's motivations.[1] All things considered, the disabled Terri Schiavo deserves another chance here.

On March 1, 2005, Dr. Cheshire, a board-certified Florida neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville and volunteer with the Florida statewide Adult Protective Services team, was called in "to provide an independent and objective medical review of allegations of possible abuse, neglect, or exploitation of Ms. Theresa Marie Schiavo"; he came into the case, he said, "with the belief that it can be ethically permissible to discontinue artificially provided nutrition and hydration for persons in a permanent vegetative state."[2] After reviewing the case log and spending time with and observing Terri, he changed his mind—primarily because he found her to be capable of human emotion, cognition, anticipation, remembering, and context-specific responses to pain. She is not, he says in the affidavit, a person in a persistent vegetative state:

"Based on this evidence, I believe that, within a reasonable degree of medical certainty, there is a greater likelihood that Terri is in a minimally conscious state than a persistent vegetative state. This distinction makes an enormous difference in making ethical decisions on Terri's behalf. If Terri is sufficiently aware of her surroundings that she can feel pleasure and suffer, if she is capable of understanding to some degree how she is being treated, then in my judgment it would be wrong to bring about her death by withdrawing food and water."[3]

This contradicts the testimony of "Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurologist and medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has examined Ms. Schiavo on behalf of the Florida courts and declared her to be irredeemably brain-damaged." Said Dr. Cranford:

"I have no idea who this Cheshire is.... He has to be bogus, a pro-life fanatic. You'll not find any credible neurologist or neurosurgeon to get involved at this point and say she's not vegetative."

"Her CAT scan shows massive shrinkage of the brain.... Her EEG is flat—flat. There's no electrical activity coming from her brain."[4]

My point is that we may well have here opposite camps divided by evidential data that is more philosophical than scientific. So long as the weight of the evidence for Terri's status as a conscious human being rests preponderantly on tests for physical functioning, it will seem to be okay to withhold life-support from this woman who now so badly needs the benefit of the doubt. I think that Dr. Cheshire's social evidence ought at least to create a chilling pause in these theatrical protestations, if not go further and call into question the line of evidence that is bent towards a flat-line materialism.

We have adequate tests for human actions—whether the closing of the eye is a wink or a blink, whether the rush of air is a laugh or flatulence, whether with my hand I am waving, saluting, or brushing aside a gnat—so we ought not to rush to medical equipment to determine something that any cluster of people with tea and demitasse glasses could for themselves decide.

1. New York Times, March 25, 2005.
2. National Review, "Dr. William Cheshire: Can she feel pain?" Affidavit as a PDF file, p. 1.
3. National Review. Cheshire affidavit as a PDF file, p. 6.
4. New York Times, "A Diagnosis With a Dose of Religion," March 25, 2005.

Quaker eyes on peace. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has a powerful 2-minute flash film, "Wage Peace," for viewing online or as a 858 KB ZIP folder for convenient downloading.[1]

The movie calls attention to two current AFSC efforts: The important Eyes Wide Open[2] nationwide touring exhibition on the human cost of the Iraq War and also the Wage Peace petition, which now has close to 34,000 signatures; the AFSC will deliver this petition to Congress and the President in April, and then again near Memorial Day.

1. The Wage Peace movie is a free download, although you can also purchase it in DVD or VHS format for $10.
2. The widely-acclaimed exhibition, Eyes Wide Open, features a pair of boots honoring each US military casualty, a field of shoes, a Wall of Remembrance to memorialize the Iraqis killed in the conflict, and a multimedia display exploring the history, cost, and human consequences of the war.

Purple fingers, wax lips. Like Vietnam, I think we'd all like the conflict in Iraq to be over with. Of course, it isn't going away, except you couldn't tell that from the coverage of events over there by the faux news. There really isn't much to report, huh? That's one of the big differences between Vietnam and Iraq—the television isn't covered with death and destruction as it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then it was everywhere; now you have to hunt for it.

Once the Iraqis got the purple finger in the faux election in January, it was as if it's all their problem now and the faux news can go on to more important things: like Social Security, steroid use in professional baseball, and, gosh, which politician can twirl the fastest around the bed of poor Terri Schiavo. Whether this is the direct result of for-profit ownership of the major news outlets, or complicity by the federal administration in controlling access to information damaging to the Busheviks, the result is still the same. We don't all get to see, two years later, that it's not much better than it was when it all began. Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with how it all began?

So on Wednesday members of the US House of Representatives wiped their teeth with Vaseline and with frozen smiles (or maybe those were wax lips) just danced la-la-la as they okayed the Bush administration's request for over $80 billion more in "emergency" spending money for Iraq and Afghanistan.[1] All of this and an obliviousness to the mass protests within the US and around the world against the Bush administration's heavy-handed and dishonest power-grab in the Middle East.[2] And the larger picture is still being hidden from us, as we discover in a recent interview with journalist Mark Benjamin, who reported on Democracy Now! that wounded US soldiers are routinely and secretively flown out of Iraq to Germany and then medically stabilized before being flown on to Washington, DC. Said Benjamin:

"What is interesting about this whole process is that all of the flights of wounded into the United States are scheduled to land at night. The wounded are arriving under the cover of darkness. Also, at least at the two hospitals, Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Medical Center, photographers and the press are barred from seeing, watching, or taking photos of the wounded arriving. So, if you take those two facts, the fact that the wounded are only arriving at night at Andrews Air Force Base, and you take the fact that we in the press are not allowed to see them when they go to the two main hospitals here, we have a situation where we're several years into the war now, and we've seen essentially no reporting or no images of these wounded arriving; and to give you just a idea of the scope of this situation, if you take the wounded soldiers and then you add in the number of hurt soldiers that the Pentagon doesn't generally report (in other words, soldiers that are hurt in vehicle accidents and so on) we have 25,000 soldiers who have been flown out of the battlefields, mostly from Iraq, some from Afghanistan. Most of those come back to the United States—25,000—and images or reporting on them arriving in the United States is almost unheard of."[3]

As if to bring this all full circle, the Pentagon is now making the preemptive attack, or what it calls "active deterrence," a key part of its approved strategic plans.[4]